


Hero And Scholar

by Frumion_III



Category: Alexander Hamilton - Ron Chernow, Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Canon Era, Gay, Hamilton - Freeform, Historical, Historical Lams, Lams - Freeform, Lin-Manuel Miranda - Freeform, Love Letters, M/M, Musical References, My First Hamilton Fic, Revolutionaries In Love, Revolutionary War, accurate historical timeline, as accurate as I can make it I promise, its fact not fiction baby
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-07
Updated: 2020-09-07
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:33:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26338819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Frumion_III/pseuds/Frumion_III
Summary: Alexander Hamilton has written his way out of Nevis, written his way into Washington's closest confidence and written his way into history, but he finds himself completely unable to write down John Laurens. What they have can't be committed to paper, not when the discovery of it would see them both hang, but it is the deepest truth of his soul.This is a story of how John Laurens shaped Alexander Hamilton, and in turn the country he helped to create.This is a tale of what was left out, the missing letters burnt from history's eyes and the stolen moments when Alexander felt most alive.
Relationships: Alexander Hamilton/John Laurens
Comments: 5
Kudos: 17





	Hero And Scholar

**Author's Note:**

> So I'll admit it, I watched the musical first, but the more I read about Hamilton's life the more inspired I got, so here's something I guess. I kept trying to write something else but this is what ended up happening instead. I'm just posting it to get it out of my system. 
> 
> I recognise the many biases of both the musical and the book that it is based on but this is just a bit of fun. Please don't use it as a resource to learn from (I've done my research but it's not exactly comprehensive) That said I've really enjoyed writing this and hope you enjoy reading it just as much. It will be either 2 or at most 3 chapters, I thought it was a oneshot but hey ho, I was wrong. 
> 
> Happy reading,  
> Frumion.

“Peterson if you were writing any slower you’d be getting younger.” Alexander looks up sharply, wondering who it is that’s echoing his thoughts so succinctly. It is not a voice he recognises. He has a feeling that he should know who it is, they are after all familiar enough with another aide to Washington to tease him so, but he has hardly looked up from his work this week and only slept away one hour of last night. Has he been introduced to someone lately? Unsure, he puts the mystery aside and gets back to translating his latest stack of letters. 

Alexander is walking through the late spring evening between the camp tents with a stack of letters in hand when he hears the voice again. The one that had put Peterson in his place so very aptly. The half dark of the flickering lamps reveals a man taller than Alexander by a stretch, laughing blue eyes bright with a fire that he recognises well. A smile, a slightly quizzical expression, and then an introduction. “I’m John Laurens, aide de camp.”  
“Hamilton,” he replies. “The same. I believe I owe you thanks.”  
“For what?” asks Laurens, his brow furrowed, Alexander wondering why his heartbeat seems so loud in his ears as he takes in the other man’s confused expression.  
“Well someone has to corral Peterson into actually working. Unequivocally a liability, that one.” His comment is met with a sharp bark of laughter, and Alexander smiles again, not sure why the sound is so pleasing to his ear. 

““How long have you been part of the family?” he asks a few days later, food tasteless and only edible because of the company he has the good fortune of keeping. His hopes that they had not been introduced when Laurens started are dashed then, for he receives a quizzical look that suggests he ought to know the answer. There is an apology on the tip o his tongue when Laurens smiles slightly and answers.  
“Only a few days. It’s incredible, being here, though I must confess myself desirous of a little more sleep.” Alexander smiles tightly, trying not to let disappointment that he feels sour the mouthful of sludge he has just taken at the mundane reply of the other man. He puts his spoon back onto the rough hewn wooden table with an audible clack and meets blue eyes with a hard stare.  
“War waits for no man.” He says. Laurens laughs in response, a sound that makes something in Alexander’s chest lurch and brightens the dull grey of the sky inexplicably for a moment that seems to last forever.  
“Too true, but could it spare time for a drink between friends?” Alexander smiled, replies in the affirmative and they agree to meet by the nearest food tent when they’ve finished writing for the day. 

Sparks fly and a slight smile takes up permanent residence on Alexander’s face without his consent. Words pour out of both of them; letters signed with Washington’s signature that they co-author, essays against the injustices of slavery, a hatred that by sharing they grow closer, dreams of the future. Plans and jokes are scribbled onto scraps of paper and shoved in a passing pocket as the hot summer days fly by. Sometimes Alexander feels a strange static charge pass between the two of them when his hands brush his companion’s, and he has never met anyone quite like Laurens. He is beautiful. So painfully beautiful in fact, that Alexander sometimes finds himself contemplating nothing but the way the light falls across his friend, the clamouring of his mind silenced for a time before something pulls him back into the present. He hasn’t decided if he enjoys these moments of calm yet, but they have become something like commonplace. Laurens’ eyes too are dangerous, so much banked fire contained therein than he can almost feel the heat of it from across the desk they share for correspondence. He doesn't know what to make of that yet either. 

Laurens draws. Alexander has come across a few idle sketches on scraps in the past, but he doesn’t give it much thought until he finds the inking of himself. Every line is as accurate as if he were staring into a mirror, perhaps more so, because of the passion conjured in the shading of his eyes. He never sees that, never having cause to look in mirrors before all his gaze will reflect is exhaustion, but Laurens has told him repeatedly how intense he can become. It is lifelike, almost eerily so, and Alexander realises that he has clearly never payed enough attention to Laurens’ artistic talents. He rifles through the rest of the papers. The General is lightly sketched, his uniform just a few lines that suggest the cut of his coat, and Lafayette, the french marquis they have befriended, appears more than once. Landscapes and scenes of battle crop up here and there as well, but the stack of papers is dominated by drawings of him. Sitting with a tankard in hand and a wide smile, standing next to a sketched figure, slumped over his portable desk. It is all him, again and again. Most of them are pencil, though the lead is darker than the standard pencils Alexander is familiar with, but there is the occasional charcoal drawing or page heavy with ink. The style varies, some are lifelike, some the barest bones of a sketch, while some seem to capture more the spirit of who he is than his face. Alexander reels in shock. John has pinned down his soul, on these pages, and he doesn’t know how to respond. 

He is still going through them when Laurens appears in their tent, and the look on his face when he sees what Alexander has in his hands is a mixture of pain and fear that Alexander doesn't recognise. It hurts him to see it on his closest friend’s face. “Laurens,” he begins, but his friend cuts him off before he can ask what to make of it all.  
“I—“ begins Laurens, then stops, his eye wild with fear. “I’m sorry.” He stops again, then starts, his voice shaking. “I could ask to move if you’re uncomfortable living with—“  
“Laurens.” It comes out far quieter than he had meant it to, the gentle tone full of something more than the reassurance he was going for. It sounds like a prayer. As they stare at each other, the drawings of him lying between them, what he feel falls into place. He wants Laurens. He wants him as he should want a woman. Alexander finds that it bothers him less than it should, this discovery of his own ungodly nature. God, he thinks to himself as the tragedies of his youth line up for inspection, has never seemed particularly invested in what he feels. He discovers to his own surprise, that he returns the sentiment. He blinks himself out of his reverie to find no one before him in the tent, and surprises himself again with the vehemence of his worry. 

He needs to find Laurens before he does something stupid. Swearing, he pulls his jacket back on and races out of the tent, wishing that he had found the drawings before there was so little light left in the sky. Laurens is nowhere to be found in amongst the tents, and none of the other aides have seen him. Lafayette does not know either, but offers to help look. Alexander grits his jaw, pushing away the roaring possessiveness he should not feel and declines as politely as he can. He’ll apologise tomorrow after he’s found Laurens. 

It is dark among the trees, and the lights of the camp are nothing more than dim specks in the distance but Alexander is now following the footprints made clear by the mud of the forest floor, and they are possible to make out even without more than a matches flare. When at last he draws near he stays as silent as possible until he is near enough to reach out a hand to Lauren’ shoulder, who jerks away at the contact, silent. “It’s me.” he says, and Laurens flinches back from him, refuses to meet his eye.  
“Just leave me be.” He says thickly, and Alexander realises with a start that Laurens has been crying.  
“No. We need to talk.” he replies, wincing at how harsh fear has made his voice. Laurens is babbling apologies, speaking fast enough that even Alexander can’t get a word in edgeways, talking about sin and the blackening of his soul and how deeply he regrets his inclinations. This, he realises numbly as his friend’s breathing reaches an unhealthy rate, is Laurens’ hurricane. Alexander swallows, doesn’t know how to get him to stop, needs him to calm down for just a moment, so that he’ll see how Alexander feels. In the end he takes Laurens’ face gently in his calloused, ink stained hands and stops his words with a kiss. He finds that he has memorised every sculpted plane of his friend’s face, sees in his minds eye Laurens’ laughing eyes and high cheekbones behind his closed eyelids when their lips crash together. He wants this. He’s wanted this from the beginning, has pushed it down for fear of being sent back to the hell he had escaped, has ignored the lingering looks and fingers that remained just a little too long on his own, but there is no going back now. 

When Alexander is sent 300 miles south to deal with Gates he’s all fire and command, not at all cowed by the much taller and more experienced general that he is being forced to deal with, and even as he lies in his sickbed during the delayed return journey he can’t bear to merely sleep. On one of his better days he attends a dance and meets some inconsequentially pretty girls that divert him less by far than they ought to. The three eldest daughters of General Phillip Schuyler do not linger in his thoughts for long, so thoroughly is he wrapped up in missing John. Ink stained fingers and purple smudges beneath his eyes are the almost permanent marks of his restlessness, and the letters he has received are worn and well thumbed by the time he is well enough to travel. He writes to Washington about Gates, the war, the work that he is doing despite his illness for the older man, and he writes to the New York papers, and the papers back in the hell he had once called home, updates on the war and poems that justly glorify the cause. 

He writes to John too, and in these missives is much more of himself than what makes its way into any of his other writings. Somewhere along the way, between forbidden kisses and stolen moments, Laurens has become John, and he is everything. The letters Alexander writes contain pieces of himself, inked slivers of his soul that he doesn’t quite realise that he has given away until he gets a response that holds a part of John in return, every scrap so much more than he deserves. 

When he gets back to camp in late January he pointedly makes his way to Washington’s tent first, hands him a bundle of manuscripts and sits down, ready to begin work immediately when he hears it again. That laughter. It spins through the air, a thousand ribbons of melodic gold that Alexander hadn’t realised he had missed this much until the sound slams into him. After that he itches, fiddles, does his work blindly and finally, finally begins to breathe again as he takes in all the little changes that the months apart have wrought in John, his eyes alight as he greets the taller man with a wide smile. That the camp is a cesspit of mud and filth populated with the living, starving dead, should have him reeling in disgust at the terrible conditions that the war had created, but he can’t keep a smile off his face. His heart stutters and races, his blood burning through his veins as all of the pain he felt at their parting is relieved. 

Alexander spreads out the long coat over the earth, kept from winter’s chill by the rough slide of John’s skin upon his own, and pulls his lover into another breathless kiss. John moans and Alexander feels his mind’s endless whirring slow. He is hypersensitive when the other man reaches for the laces of his breeches with an easy dexterity. John produces a small vial of what looks like some sort of oil but when it’s opened the pungent smell of canon lubricant pulls a surprised laugh from him, and John’s kissing him again, laughing and making quieting noises before lapsing into fresh giggles. Alexander catches John’s hand with his own and he brings it to his mouth, kissing his knuckles and spreading his legs invitingly. John blinks down at him in surprise before splitting into a wide smile and leaning down to claim Alexander’s lips once more. “That’s a surprise.” He murmurs, and Alexander laughs again, then chokes on arousal as John takes him in hand.  
“Really?” he asks, and John laughs.  
“You’re so angry, so passionate so driven. I was expecting you to be consistent in this despite the unorthodox situation. Believe me, I am as far as it is possible to be from disappointed.” Alexander laughs, shakes his head knowingly and pulls John down into another searing kiss. 

Alexander itches to do something. He deserves command, and John can do nothing to sooth the frustration bubbling beneath his skin but distract him, so distract him he does. They lose themselves in each other, spend every possible moment together until even The General acts surprised when Alexander is seen alone. February passes by in a flurry of snowstorms and bitterly cold nights, but Alexander feels none of it, his hands warmed against John’s skin and his breath not given the space in the cold air to cloud before John is stealing it away. He is beautiful and he is passionate and Alexander finds he has learnt what it feels like to fall helplessly, endlessly in love. When they ride together he smiles, incapable of anything else despite the grim outlook they share on the future. When they work together he can communicate his ideas better, think aloud without having to explain the leaps of logic he finds so simple and thus get more done in the average day. When they lie tangled together he allows himself moments of being palpably alive, lets himself feel the strength of the love that would see them both condemned to death if it were discovered. 

Alexander is not at all sure that Washington made the right decision in appointing Charles Lee. John and Lafayette have both argued to give Alexander command but both are refuted without explanation. The appointment of Lee of all people adds insult to injury. As usual, he’s right. Alexander and John are assigned reconnaissance for most of the battle of Monmouth and what they see brings them no joy. Their victory had been all but assured when the dawn came, and somehow Lee still manages to fail. When the idiot throws the men under his direct command into retreat they both refuse to back down, and instead find themselves unexpectedly in the centre of combat. Working together, they do their utmost to protect the artillery left, cursing the bastard’s name throughout. They attend Lee’s subsequent court marshal with relish the following month. It isn’t quite enough. He couldn’t be trusted to shine a shoe, let alone lead a group of soldiers, and in disgrace, Lee begins a slanderous campaign against Washington. Alexander reaches his limit. Under direct orders to let the issue lie, he grits his teeth and holds his tongue, and in the end it’s John who suggests an honour duel. He leaps at the chance. 

The night before the duel they fuck like men doomed to die with the sunrise, a desperate sense of the fragility of the life pumping through both their veins lending their coupling a rough edge of danger. Alex feels his skin singing, every caress a line of fire stoking the lust within him until they pull each other over the edge into orgasm. 

“Don’t die my dear, dear John Laurens.” he says, his voice cracking as the first red line of dawn breaks over the horizon. It looks like blood. Alexander swallows down the comment, locks the superstitions he had grown up with away into a part of his mind distant enough that their voices are closer to whispers than screams. Red dawns mean nothing here, where belief is secondary to survival and words hold the power to change the world. He traces the shape of John’s lips with his thumb in the half light, his hand falling away too soon. He hands John his own meticulously oiled gun, and receives a smile in return.  
“I won’t, I promise.” John’s voice is cold and steady, as are his hands as they brush over Alexander’s own. He finds, now that the sun is coaxing the dawn sky into daybreak, that he is shaking. He can’t bear to think what might happen. The walk to the duelling ground seems both interminable and too quickly gone. John’s eyes are warm, steady. The love he knows lurks there is smothered beneath steel, and in that moment Alexander sees the metal that John is made of, the core of who he is. He bites his lip nervously, realising far too late that he has lost his soul, mind and heart to the man standing before him. The thought echoes in him, and it should not carry the dread weight that it does, but this could be the last meeting of their eyes. The promises that John has made him could be broken. He could die. He wants nothing more than to take John’s mouth in a kiss, but of course that is nothing more than a dangerous, wistful fantasy now, where anyone might see them. The sun is already up by the time they reach Lee. 

Nods are exchanged and Alexander watches, his heart in his mouth as the two men turn and count to ten. The shot rings out and then Lee is falling, the thud of his weight hitting the hard ground lyrical in its beauty. John is standing still, alive and whole. They embrace, Alexander not quite knowing how the distance between them disappeared. “Lee,” his lover begins, Alexander’s hand still curled around John’s waist as he speaks. “Do you yield?”  
“You shot him in the side, yes he yields.” says the other second. They share shaky laughter, adrenaline flooding them both as if they share a single body, and there is some suggestion of the lewd sparkling in his eyes when John speaks again.  
“Well I’m satisfied.”  
Alexander feels his mouth go dry and they walk off without another word to anyone else, too lost in each other to be concerned about anything from the war to the camp, and cold to the severity of the injury John had inflicted as the sun rose. 

He writes, tears tracking down his face as the loneliness bears down on him, the summer sunset taking with it any warmth he could bring himself to feel. John has gone back to the south, aiming once again to raise a black battalion in defence of Charlestown despite his numerous previous failures. Alexander shares his frustrations, has written countless essays supporting him, but now that he has actually been called home it is tearing Alexander apart. Laurens’ warm embrace is his home now, as much as New York ever had been. And so, his letters become less discrete than they should be. Not quite a profession of love, never in so many words, but with each letter it gets harder to not say. 

‘Cold in my professions, warm in my friendships, I wish, my Dear Laurens, it might be in my power, by action rather than words, to convince you again that I love you.’ He writes, caution thrown to the wind, ‘I shall only tell you that 'till you bade us Adieu, I hardly knew the value you had taught my heart to set upon you. Indeed, my friend, it was not well done. You know the opinion I entertain of mankind, and how much it is my desire to preserve myself free from particular attachments, and to keep my happiness independent on the caprice of others.’ 

That is the truth of it. Alexander had been so afraid to love again, knowing that it would all shatter, the shards of what he felt made more painful by their intensity, and yet John had conned his way into his heart. His laughter, his intelligence. Alexander missed him, a raw wound in his chest draining the colour from his cheeks until fellow soldiers were asking after his health. 

‘You should not have taken advantage of my sensibility to steal into my affections without my consent. But as you have done it and as we are generally indulgent to those we love, I shall not scruple to pardon the fraud you have committed, on condition that for my sake, if not for your own, you will always continue to merit the partiality, which you have so artfully instilled into me.’

John has threaded himself into Alexander’s lungs. Every breath feels like a blessing and a curse, the steel threads winding tighter with every day they spend apart, choking him with hope and love. John has written himself into Alexander’s pulse, drawn his image onto the back of his eyelids and forced him to feel emotions that he knows will only hurt him in the end. They’re hurting him now, but somehow Alexander knows, when he is between waking and sleeping, that there is worse to come. If John were here he would laugh and distract him from his maudlin fears with a kiss, a drawing, a poem, but he is an eternity away and Alexander has no one that can talk away his fears when his mind turns against him. 

He crosses paths with the Schuyler sisters again, finds himself dancing and laughing with the elder two, and fighting back guilt he knows he should not feel. Eliza looks at him the same way John does, as if his face contains some answer to the most important question in her life. When they dance, or when the two of them join her older sister Angelica in debate, he feels less hollow than he has since John left for Charlestown. He tries to forget, tries to tell himself that John would love them if they somehow met. He doesn’t believe it for a second. John would be jealous, so achingly jealous of what they could safely display, and what Alexander feels for them. It is not the same as what he feels for John, not as potent or as tightly wound into his very being, but he feels more than he wants to. Less than he should, for a single man in the presence of a rich and attractive unmarried woman, but far far more than he wants to. He feels as if he is betraying John. He is. 

He writes again, of wives and women, and of not wanting anyone but John to while away the dark hours of the world with. He writes of the sex he wants and describes how John feels inside him, tells his lover what he feels when the two of them become one. He writes of love and of the steel bands that he has discovered lurking in his chest that bind them together. He knows before he has even finished writing the letter that it can’t be sent. It is too much, too incriminating and too intimate to be put down on paper for any passing eye to see. He burns the six pages he had written one by one, each curling flame burnt into his memory as he watches the truth of his love shrivel to the blueish ash of inked paper. He rewrites it, manages to bring up finding himself a wife, slipping in jokes about the length of his nose and how John should be the one to choose his bride. He can’t bring himself to tell John about Eliza, the understanding they have come to. The words he has burnt away choke him, and barbed wire secrets cut his tongue as they lie there unspoken. He feels dirty, weak and desperately alone. 

John is a prisoner of war. The news comes not long after Alexander has reached the general’s rooms, and he buckles where he stands. “He will be kept alive?” He hears himself ask as if from a great distance. The general nods. Alexander learns how to breathe again. In between writing and riding and the actual business of fighting a war Alexander has very little time for his personal life, and still he writes to John. Many have joked now, about how worn the messengers that travel south must be, with the frequency that he writes to Laurens. They have no idea how many letters he tries to write, only to give up, or how many he writes only to spill the feelings he has out into the world, burning them before the ink is dry. It’s not enough. He argues himself hoarse to get Washington to arrange a hostage exchange, but to no avail. There are moments when he hates them all, the so called family of aides, for they will not work with him to get his John back to the safety of American lines. They will not help him at all. When he writes he is bitter. 

“I have talked to the General about your exchange; but the rigid rules of impartiality oppose my wishes. I am the only one in the family who think you can be exchanged with any propriety, on the score of your relation to the Commander in Chief.” 

It leaves a bad taste in his mouth and the rest of the letter is filled with his sentiments towards John, how ardently he opposes Washington’s decision. Once again he is constantly, suffocatingly reminded of how far John is from him. Some nights, he wastes the precious few hours he can afford to sleep away staring up at the stars, wondering if John can see them too from whatever barred window he is locked behind. Often the thought is comforting, the idea that they could share something even now, when scores upon scores of leagues lie between them. On other nights it only makes it worse, Alexander’s vivid imagination, so frequently employed for military tactics or the phrasing of a vital letter, turns against him. On those nights he is sure that John is being brutalised by the British forces, sure that he has been forgotten, sure that he will never see his John again. He knows that it is nought but the dark dreaming of an overwrought mind, but that doesn’t comfort him when his hands begin to shake, or when he loses pallor and weight to the worry that eats at him like an infection. He doesn’t know how to live without John by his side anymore. 

John sends with the next letter a fraying ribbon, and Alexander knows when he runs it through his fingers, that it is one of John’s. He always did prefer to tie his hair back with something revolution-blue. Though it is much stained with ink and dirt, and is not entirely free of blood, it is a promise. John understands. He writes carefully, making sure with every word to let slip nothing of their true bond, but he has said all that he means with the gift. Alexander rarely removes it from his hair.

One day a letter comes to them for John, though he has been gone for months, and Alexander’s cursed curiosity forces his hand in the opening of his lover’s private correspondences. He regrets it. John has a family. A wife and daughter living in London who he never even told Alexander about. A child who he abandoned. Bitter memories fill him with a discontented anger towards his John, and he can’t stand it. John, for whom he would do anything, had left a daughter in the same dishonourable was Alexander’s father left him. He can almost smell the hot air of Nevis whenever he thinks about it, can almost taste the creeping misery, the tears. It leaves his nauseous. ‘It was not well done my friend,’ he writes, and knows when he has let the ink dry that he has not expressed his feelings honestly. 

Though what John has done leaves a bitter taste in his mouth, Alexander forgives him his past with the letter he receives in return. It says little more than usual, but his lover signs off with less untruth in his pen than usual, as ‘Ever your affectionate Laurens’ and that, it seems, is enough. He can hardly explain it to himself, but it is true. 

Eliza fills some of the yawning hole inside him, not completely, for the ache of being parted from John twists like a knife wound every time he enters a room to find it empty of his beloved, but more than he thought she would. He writes her letters upon letters, watches as she falls a little more in love every time they meet, and burns with guilt. What had been light flirtation, the enjoyment of intelligent company, is now something else. It has shifted, without his knowledge or consent, towards something much more than that. When Alexander finds a free moment it consumes his thoughts, and he hates himself, or Eliza, or sometimes even John. After all, he would be wholly in love with a well connected young woman were it not for having known John Laurens. When he finds himself thinking that he writes more frequently, as if making up for the things he feels. John does not write in his frequent responses that Alexander’s letter’s are a lifeline, the only thing keeping him sane, but Alexander reads it easily in the slant of his pen, the shaking tail end of his own signature. He, of course, writes more often as a consequence. He cannot figure out how to break it to John, who is still locked away in some prison cell in the now British-held Charlestown, that he is to be married within the next three months. He knows that he must tell him sooner rather than later, but he is at a loss for words. His heart is tearing itself apart. He begins the letter so many times, so uncertain how to go about telling his love that he will be wed, and knows the news will crush him. 

He is wrong. John is not angry, when he finally works up the nerve to tell him. There is nothing in his words or penmanship to suggest it. Alexander has studied his hand at length, knows the little shifts of grip and pace that so change his friend’s lettering when he is angered, and they are absent here. Every stroke of his pen tells Alexander that John is happy for him. In fact, he is almost unflinchingly heartfelt in his wishes for Alexander’s shared future to be bright. That is almost worse than the jealousy Alexander had thought would plague him. John is by far a better man than he. It is only later that he sees the letter for the lie it is.

John has written less and less frequently since Alexander broke the news, despite his reassurances, and he is getting desperate. The news has shifted John’s letters dramatically, no matter how elegantly penned, and in the latest of them he called Alexander cured, as if of the sickness of their love. He wants to hit him. He want’s to hold him close. He wants to shake him until he can’t see straight for saying what he did. He can do none of these things. Instead he writes ‘In spite of Schuyler’s black eyes, I have still a part for the public and another for you; so your impatience to have me married is misplaced; a strange cure by the way, as if after matrimony I was to be less devoted than I am now.’ and hopes that it will be enough. He knows that it is not. Eliza has faded into the back of his mind once more, though her letters are much more frequent and heartfelt than those few John deigns to write. Alexander is losing him, and he doesn't know how to fix it.

John is finally exchanged in November 1780, but still he does not come home to Alexander. Instead he stays in Philadelphia, writes that he can not come back as Congress is considering him for the position of envoy to France. He finds himself speaking more often of John, to almost everyone, as the news of his release sinks in, and few have not asked him why Laurens will not be best man at the wedding. He has not yet found an answer that doesn’t cut him to his core to speak aloud. He is married on the fourteenth of December in Albany. John does not attend.

**Author's Note:**

> Please leave a comment :) I'll upload part 2 faster if you do.


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